While in Los Angeles, I finally got to visit Farmlab, where the lines differentiating artists and agriculturalists blur. It is located in downtown Los Angeles, between Chintatown and Lincoln Heights. Farmlab is part of the metabolic studio, which is where artist and Annenberg Foundation Trustee Lauren Bon practices. Ms Bon's sculpture, NOTACORNFIELD, converted the brownfield across the street from the warehouse into a greenfield in 2005-2006. Farmlab emgerged from that process.

Jaime Lopez Wolters, an agriculturist with Farmlab, took me on a tour of their space. Their headquarters are near downtown Los Angeles, right across from the cornfield they planted. The building is surrounding by fragmented plantings in agricultural bins; the sidewalk out front, the alleyway, under the bridge are all the community garden that provides produce for the employees lunches and a seed bank.

Junker cars have also been planted with vegetables and ornamentals; this seemed a natural for car-loving Angelenos, and parking spaces the most readily available slots for having these mini-parks.

The ag-bins have been discarded by California citrus growers; some have been outfitted with self watering mechanisms pumped by a stationary bicycle, and Jaime designed others to be constructed on posts to collect rain water for irrigation.

These ag-bins have also been distributed to 5 organizations on Skid Row. The gardens in front of the Downtown Women's Center, a place for single women to transition out of homelessness, are doing well, as a community gardening group that took ownership of the boxes. Ag bins at the Homeless Healthcare, a needle exchange place, did not fare quite as well, but due to some recent rains, the mint is bouncing back.

I visited these places with Jaime and asked him about the gardens chances of survival in place with people who might not be the most reliable gardeners. But that's part of the point--Jaime explained--seeing plants thrive even in hostile environments. In the treeless, skid row of L.A., area denizens have started to comment to one another on how well each others gardens are growing.